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If your exit strategy is to pass your business down to the next generation of family members, selling a piece of the company to an outside buyer may surprisingly make a lot of sense as part of your overall exit plan. Normally, keeping the business in the family means just that—preserving family ownership, not selling to an outsider. But selling a minority interest (less than 50%) of the company to an outside investor can help overcome some of the more difficult challenges that family business owners face in their exit and succession planning. Here’s how.

Athletes, celebrity entertainers, politicians, models—everybody seems to want to “go out on top” at the end of their careers. At first glance, it should be the same for business owners; they, too, should strive to go out on top when they exit from their business. After all, in order to sell the business for maximum value, create a sustained business legacy, and exit under their own terms, owners should exit at the business’s peak—right? Perhaps not.

If you intend to exit from your company one day by selling to an outside buyer, at some point in the process, you may well find yourself feeling like the diminutive David facing the monstrous Goliath. And for good reason. Buyers possess fundamental advantages over most sellers due to their diverse experiences and resources. These advantages enable buyers to potentially dominate the process of acquiring your company and put you at risk of receiving a lower price and less favorable terms than might otherwise be available. When you go to exit, if you are unaware and unprepared to counter buyers’ advantages, your exit may be less profitable and more stressful.

According to the FritoLay company website, FRITOS® are “still satisfying fans after more than 80 years.” Surprisingly, these classic corn chips can also help business owners plan for and achieve successful exits. Here’s how.

There’s an old saying that problems arrive at your office door on two feet. Would your business be stronger and potentially grow faster if solutions, rather than problems, routinely arrived at your door? The answer is almost certainly yes. Plus, one of the biggest factors limiting value in many companies is management teams that can’t or won’t make important decisions without the owner. While there are undoubtedly strategic problems or decisions that only the owner/CEO can resolve, those should be the exception rather than the rule. A healthy organization cannot depend on owners to handle day-to-day, week-to-week problems, and challenges. Eventually, this dependency will slow your company's growth. Worse, reliance on owners also makes it harder if not impossible to achieve successful exits.